Four percent!

Last week, I issued a
challenge:
guess how many of my 47 former coworkers were male and how many were
female. It's been a couple of days and I've received some guesses.

Unfortunately, those guesses were all too high. The actual ratio was
0/47. It was a list of coworkers, and indeed, I was all by myself on my
various teams through the years. If you add me to the list, then you
get 1/48, or about 2%.

Since I wrote that post, it came to my attention that one woman joined
one of the dev teams for a service I had supported after my pager monkey
team split up. Basically, she wasn't on there when I was supporting
them, but showed up shortly thereafter. We can be charitable and add
her into the picture, and that gives us 2/49, or about 4%.

Wow, four whole percent!

Sure, there were women in eng, but you could go for a very long time
without ever encountering one as a coworker on your team. The gap
between zero and one is huge.